A native of Philadelphia, Doughty represents a link between the eighteenth-century pastoral style of landscape painting first imported from England and the passionate language of the Sublime introduced later by Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School. Doughty occasionally attempted to emulate the style of his more famous successor, as in the gnarled expressiveness of the largest tree in this picture, but he could never forsake the modesty of arrangement and touch that distilled, even from a specific site, a “river glimpse.”